Five Things About Likes on Instagram

So, I’ve been using Instagram for a few months now and while the whole “how to get followers” thing still eludes me, I learned a few things about what matters when it comes to getting likes on Instagram.

Improves the Like-Count:

Posting Frequency
Posts have shelf-lives and for me it’s roughly a week. But people often like older pictures when they find one of the latest ones.

Hashtags
It’s hard to tell which are the right ones to use for a particular content. But both the small, slow-moving and the huge high-volume ones are worth using. For the first, your image stays current longer, the other gets more eyeballs, but you drop favours.

Commenting and favouriting other people’s workIt makes a small but noticeable difference; I guess other artists like to know who checked out their stuff as much as I do.

Image descriptionPictures with a nice story about why or how it was made seem to do better than pictures with “here’s a thing”. But I need more data to confirm/deny that.

ThIngs THat do not matter:

Polish of the ArtworkGranted, I am not the best judge about the quality of my artwork, but its telling I get more interest in a few charismatic sketches than my highly polished illustrations. Maybe it’s because the hashtags I use, maybe because the photostream does not give them room to breathe, but it GRATES.

If its Colour or Black & WhiteAt first I thought the colour works would be doing better, but now that I got better at hashtags and descriptions, it really makes no difference. Maybe its a sign I need to find better hashtags for my colour images – or maybe my black and white is simply stronger. I do not know.

The Relationship Between Likes and Followers on Instagram

Follower count seems to impact likes – see the stream of artists followed by thousands – but for me my likes do not translate into followers. I cannot break a count of fifteen, and often drop as low as nine or ten.

That’s the next thing I want to figure out, I’d like to break 25 followers and stay there.